If your system has excess of 3 gigs of ram then a 64 bit system can use it. This might be important for databse services and so on but for normal use 32 bit should be fine. Some claim a 64 bit system is snappier with a 64 bit processor only your system will tell.

The instruction set on a 64bit cpu running in 64bit mode has some advantages for security as well. Certain capabilities that are present under 64bit mode make it much more difficult for a code vulnerability to actually be exploited. The changes in memory addressing alone contributes to this some.

As far as speed, it would mostly be a per-user thing like vector said. The increase in speed is based on the fact that there is only one "group" of compiler optimization for 64bit processors, so any 64bit processor can have the maximum of optimizations under a given -O# flag or -mcpu. 32bit cpu have undergone so many revisions even -mcpu=686 will behave have varying suboptimal support from one 686 processor to the next.

The last part of your question has not been answered. Most software iswritten for 32 bit. You experiences with 64 bit maybe decent or limiting. In my experience it was limiting. Flash is not well supported. The other programs had minor glitches like some games were to slow or too fast.Wine does not work the best in 64 bit either.

Actually, Flash is now well supported for 64-bit. That is a recent development but Adobe has finally gotten their act together.

Any app that does real time 3D graphics rendering (games, scientific apps, etc...) will run much faster with native 64-bit code. Ditto anything doing very heavy computation. For web browsing, e-mail, word processing and other typical uses you will see no difference.

WINE is a poor substitute for just running a virtual instance of Windows. In general, if you need Windows apps at this point you are best off running Windows or using a commercial product like Crossover Office.

My basic rule of thumb: if a distro doesn't have a 64-bit version I won't run that distro, period. That's why I disappeared. I'm going to look at the development version of VL64 7.0 and if it really does get completed I will be back.

I think the 64b version is very much alive at this point despite our limited resources and manpower. I know Uelsk8s has been putting a lot of effort into this. FWIW, I use it as my main OS @ home now on a core2quad which I use to do chrooted builds and run virtulized Windows and linux installs. Holds up pretty good.

Have to agree on this. The 64-bit version is really fast and the development version runs pretty fine on my Athlon 64. The application selection is growing almost any day and I'd say it's a really pretty gaming system!

VL seems to be on a pretty strong track for 64bit. Flash is working wonderfully, I've had success with both ATI and Nvidia propriatory drivers, Minecraft runs nicely too Virtualbox runs great on VL 64bit.

Just like with Slackware64, you can install 32bit applications directly into the system if you need to.

The big downside to VL64 right now is that many applications are "behind" 32bit, in that they have not been yet updated to the latest versions. All are fairly recent, but not caught up with VL7.0 32bit Gold.

Like M0E, I run VL64bit beta1 as my primary desktop OS, and use it for development as well. I have a 32bit VL that I chroot to to cross-compile packages. I don't chroot to it for anything else.

When we have fully released Vector Linux 64bit, I might start dual booting that to get a good feel of it before installing or recommending it to some newbie users I know. I am in the same boat with Caitlyn per the 64bit thing.